CONWAY, Ark. (September 19, 2016) – Hendrix College will host “Cacao Biology, Chocolate Culture: An Ecology of Colonial Knowledge and the Genesis of Taste,” a public lecture by Dr. Kathryn E. Sampeck on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 6:30 p.m., in Mills C in the Mills
Social Sciences Center.
The lecture, sponsored by the Hendrix Sociology and Anthropology Club, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Hendrix anthropology professor Dr. Stacey Schwartzkopf at 501-505-1507 or
schwartzkopf@hendrix.edu.
About the Lecture
Cacao, a tree whose seeds people use to make chocolate, has long been a way for people to understand the world. For pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, cacao linked people to each other, the plants, animals, and places around them, and to the divine, the environment seen and
unseen. This interpretation of environmental relationships of and through cacao was equally vibrant for newly arrived colonists in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Colonists and chroniclers recorded a systematic knowledge of the biotic world, including the delicate ecology of cacao, which simultaneously
addressed interests in medical understanding, economic strategy, personal utility, and the blossoming of science. Ecologies of cacao were in a symbiotic relationship with colonial ecologies of gender, labor, and commerce, a nexus of cultural relationships that also included classification of types of people.
Cacao was an eye of the storm of colonial desires for profit and order and countercurrents of the dark and brutal forces of social inequality and resistance to them. How we experience and understand chocolate today has deep roots in these colonial dynamics.
About the Lecturer
Dr. Kathryn E. Sampeck is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University. Her publications on the archaeology and ethnohistory of Spanish colonialism appear in American Antiquity, Ethnohistory, Historical Archaeology, International
Journal of Historical Archaeology, Mesoamérica,Ancient Mesoamerica, and Journal of Latin American Geography. Dr. Sampeck is the 2015-2016 Central America Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Her previous fellowships
include the John Carter Brown Library and Colonial Williamsburg and grants from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright program, and Cherokee Preservation Foundation. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and
her Ph.D. from Tulane University.
About Hendrix College
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Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. Founded in 1876 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884, Hendrix is featured in Colleges That Think about Colleges and is nationally recognized in numerous college guides,
lists, and rankings for academic quality, community, innovation, and value. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.